The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [83]
“Rather than being one planet among billions, Earth now appears to be the uncommon Earth,” said science educators Jimmy H. Davis and Harry L. Poe. “The data imply that Earth may be the only planet ‘in the right place at the right time.’ ” 19
A BOLD AND AUDACIOUS CLAIM
Earth’s location, its size, its composition, its structure, its atmosphere, its temperature, its internal dynamics, and its many intricate cycles that are essential to life—the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, the sulfur cycle, the calcium cycle, the sodium cycle, and so on—testify to the degree to which our planet is exquisitely and precariously balanced. 20
As they begin their influential textbook Earth, Frank Press of the National Academy of Sciences and Raymond Siever of Harvard University write about what they call “the uniqueness of planet Earth.” 21
They note how its atmosphere filters out harmful ultraviolet radiation while working with the oceans to moderate the climate through the storing and redistributing of solar energy, and how the Earth is just large enough so that its gravity retains the atmosphere and yet just small enough not to keep too many harmful gases. Then they describe the Earth’s interior as . . .
. . . a gigantic but delicately balanced heat engine fueled by radioactivity. . . . Were it running more slowly . . . the continents might not have evolved to their present form. . . . Iron may never have melted and sunk to the liquid core, and the magnetic field would never have developed. . . . If there had been more radioactive fuel, and therefore a faster running engine, volcanic dust would have blotted out the sun, the atmosphere would have been oppressively dense, and the surface would have been racked by daily earthquakes and volcanic explosions. 22
These kind of highly choreographed geological processes—and there are lots of them—leave me shaking my head at the astounding ways in which our biosphere is precisely tuned for life. Even more interesting, though, is the “why” question behind them. What accounts for all of these astounding “coincidences?”
Press and Siever, while marveling that Earth “is a very special place,” don’t broach the possibility of design. 23 Ward and Brownlee skirt the issue in Rare Earth, preferring instead to occasionally pepper in words like “sheer luck” and “a rare chance happening.” 24 At a conference, Ward remarked: “We are just incredibly lucky. Somebody had to win the big lottery, and we were it.”
But does luck really explain why Earth enjoys this incredible convergence of extremely unlikely circumstances that have allowed human beings to flourish? Going far back into time, Christians have reached a far different conclusion: Earth was created by God as the stage upon which the human drama would be played out. What’s amazing about modern science, including new discoveries just within the last few years, is that this view of the universe seems to be far better supported today than in ancient times.
Consider the conclusion of Michael J. Denton, a senior research fellow in human molecular genetics at the University of Otago in New Zealand, in his 1998 book Nature’s Destiny:
No other theory or concept ever imagined by man can equal in boldness and audacity this great claim . . . that all the starry heavens, that every species of life, that every characteristic of reality exists [to create a livable habitat] for mankind. . . . But most remarkably, given its audacity, it is a claim which is very far from a discredited prescientific myth. In fact, no observation has ever laid the presumption to rest. And today, four centuries after the scientific revolution, the doctrine is again reemerging. In these last decades of the twentieth century, its credibility is being enhanced by discoveries in several branches of fundamental science. 25
How true are those words? Do the special conditions that allow for life on Earth demand a designer? To pursue reliable